The Mountain Shadow

‘Cleaning up.’

‘After you cleaned the cuts on my hands and feet.’

‘I’m a sanitary guy.’

I settled in beside her, and she settled in beside me.

‘He’s gone,’ she said, her face against my chest.

‘He’s gone,’ I echoed.

Day raised the blue banner, and sounds of life shuddered from sleep: a shout, a laugh, bird cry brazen in the light, and doves trembling stories of love.

She slept again, and I was calm with her, in the peace that only sleeping love creates, while thoughts of Abdullah, bullet wounds in the mind, kept bleeding.

He was self-discipline, he was kindness unto blood for a friend, and he was ruthless enough to shame his own honour, which I was, too, in my own way.

I slept, at last, riding a wave of consolation in words, words Idriss spoke, running through my mind again and again, sheep counting sheep.

The mystery of love is what we will become, the phrase repeated. The mystery of love is what we will become. And the susurrus of syllables became the first gentle rain of the new monsoon, as we woke the next morning.

Still wounded by the night we returned to the camp as heavy rain filled the sky with seas, purified in ascension and pouring from tree-shoulders, shaken in the wind.

Rivulets played, making their own way through prior plans, and birds huddled on branches, not risking freedom’s flight. Plants that had been thin apostrophes became paragraphs, and vines that had slumbered like snakes in winter writhed insolent in vivid new green. Baptised by the sky, the world was born again, and hope washed a year’s dust and blood from the mountain.

Part Fifteen

Chapter Eighty-Five

At the end of that first week of rain, after watching Silvano

dance with students in a rare, sunny shower, and even Idriss shake a step or two, leaning on his long staff, Karla and I made our way down the mountain for the last time.

We didn’t know that the steep path we took would vanish, in a year or so, erased by nature. We didn’t know that the mesa, and the caves, too, would be overgrown not long after Idriss and his students dismantled their camp and left for Varanasi.

We didn’t know that it was the last time we’d ever see him. We were bubbling stories about him all the way down to the highway, unaware that he was already a ghost of philosophy, continuing in us through memories and ideas alone. We didn’t know that Idriss was already as lost to us in time as Abdullah.

We raced a black cloud all the way back to the birth of the peninsula, at Metro, and parked the bike under the arch beneath the Amritsar hotel, just as a new storm hit.

The tempest came at us from both sides of the archway, and we clung together, laughing as torrents scourged us. When the storm passed, we wiped the bike down together, Karla talking to her all the while like a psychic mechanic.

We climbed the stairs to the lobby, and found it changed, after our weeks on the mountain. There was a glass refrigerator door, where Jaswant’s secret cabinet had been. He still had his swanky chair, but a swanky new glass and synthetic laminate counter replaced the wooden reception desk.

Jaswant himself was in a swanky suit, complete with a tie.

‘What the hell, Jaswant?’ I said.

‘You’ve got to embrace change, man,’ Jaswant said. ‘Hello, Miss Karla. How lovely to see you again.’

‘Nice suit, Jaswant,’ she replied.

‘Thank you, Miss Karla. Do you think it fits okay?’

‘Very slimming. Come, say hi. But be careful, I’m dripping wet.’

I was still frowning old doubt on the new desk.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘Your reception desk looks like an airline counter.’

‘So?’

‘An airline counter is something you go to because you have to, not because you want to.’

‘You can visit the old desk, any time you want. Oleg bought it. It’s in your rooms.’

‘Oleg! Damn, he’s good. He beat me to it.’

‘The new desk’s okay, Jaswant,’ Karla said. ‘Put a plant on the top shelf, and a nice big shell beside it, and maybe a blown-glass paperweight on the second shelf. It’ll soften things. I’ve got a shell you can borrow, if you like, and a paperweight that has a dandelion in it.’

‘Really? I’d love that.’

‘There’s no rum in here,’ I said, wiping condensation off the glass door of his new refrigerated cabinet. ‘And no cheese.’

‘There’s a new menu,’ Jaswant said, flipping a laminated card on the laminated airline counter.

I didn’t look at it.

‘I liked the old menu.’

‘We didn’t have an old menu,’ Jaswant frowned.

‘Exactly.’

‘The Lost Love Bureau is bringing a lot of people through the door now, and I have to present the right corporate image. You’ve got to get with the times, Lin.’

‘I prefer it when the times get with me.’

‘Heads-up, Jaswant,’ Karla said. ‘I’ve been thinking of making some changes to my rooms.’

‘Changes?’ Jaswant asked, commerce tightening his new tie.